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Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

tauri.studio

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Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#51

Post by brundolf »

munificent wrote: post #48
the_duke wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major benefit of Electron is that you can develop against a single browser and runtime version and don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks. On Windows the default webview engine is still not the new Chromium but old Edge (WebView2 has to be installed separately), Safari has a fair amount of issues and gtk-webkit can be very quirky as well. This is not so significant if your app…

> Webviews are also a moving target so you need a big testing matrix. Even worse, an OS update after you ship your app can spontaneously break it on end user's machines without you knowing or being able to do anything about it. At least with the web, when new browser versions come out, you can fix your site since users essentially "install" it every time they refresh the page. But an installed app that runs on top of…

It's not hard to silently auto-update an Electron app's internals; I assume the same is true for Tauri

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#52

Post by vulcan01 »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #45
vulcan01 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm not mistaken, this is just because the CSS styling isn't that good, right? Take Slack (which uses Electron) as an example: it looks almost the same on Windows and Mac, but it looks good — because the styling (through CSS) is good.

Is CSS really the major factor in the memory usage of an Electron app?

I wasn't responding to the memory usage portion of the GP's message, but rather to the alien feel.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#53

Post by munificent »

swagonomixxx wrote: post #39

This kind of makes me think... is there room for a much more stripped down version of Chromium that is suitable for lower memory footprint? Or is this impossible? It looks like Tauri uses system webviews, which use a lot less memory, but the burden is then on the developer to make sure that they build essentially 3 (maybe more) UI's on platforms that might change under their feet. That's why the Electron approach is…

> is there room for a much more stripped down version of Chromium that is suitable for lower memory footprint?

That's basically the history of Flutter. The initial goal was something like "Web: The Good Parts" and the results of that experiment led them to where they are now.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#54

Post by sterlind »

pupdogg wrote: post #27

Whenever I'm reminded of Electron, I'm thankful to have experienced WinAmp!

ironic, because Electron apps should be easily skinnable. just put new CSS and images, maybe some new html, especially if there's some way of exposing e.g. the UI components so you can alter the layout and such.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#55

Post by unnouinceput »

swagonomixxx wrote: post #39

This kind of makes me think... is there room for a much more stripped down version of Chromium that is suitable for lower memory footprint? Or is this impossible? It looks like Tauri uses system webviews, which use a lot less memory, but the burden is then on the developer to make sure that they build essentially 3 (maybe more) UI's on platforms that might change under their feet. That's why the Electron approach is…

I wish Mozilla would do the same move as well. I remember in 2000's I had a Mozilla ActiveX that I could bundle in my applications and instant web browser without IE crap (back then was Mozilla vs IE only, Chrome was still in its infancy).

Nowadays Mozilla it seems they don't even export the old ActiveX, let alone to have their own webview equivalent.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#56

Post by notatoad »

smasher164 wrote: post #33
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tauri doesn't and instead relies on webview, which uses a different browser engine dependent on your platform, with all the incompatibilities that come with it. Isn't windows system webview now a chromium fork? This should make incompatibility on the major platforms now much less of an issue.

People act as if they haven’t dealt browser incompatibilities in the past. Just feature-detect/polyfill and move on.

Some people haven't dealt with browser incompatibilities in the past. Not every developer comes from a webapp background, and electron is a platform to develop desktop apps. desktop app developers don't want to deal with polyfills and feature-detection in their platform.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#57

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

the_duke wrote: post #41
vlovich123 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Windows is basically Chrome so your diversity will basically be Chrome & WebKit which is what you have anyway. And having all the fun of web development against multiple browsers with all the headaches of desktop distribution is kind of the worst of all worlds. It'll be interesting to see if this approach finds success (since it may cut down on the size of your binary) but it could easily get abandoned if any si…

> Well Windows is basically Chrome As far as I know that's not accurate and the default webview on Windows is still the old Edge based one, not Chromium. The plans here are somewhat unknown I think, but right now you have to force the user to download and install (or bundle an installer) for WebView2 or Edge beta channel if you don't want to support old Edge. Gtk-webkit is also quite different from Safari, you can't…

The latest WebView2 is based on Edge Chromium AFAIK. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview...

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#58

Post by [deleted] »

munificent wrote: post #48
the_duke wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major benefit of Electron is that you can develop against a single browser and runtime version and don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks. On Windows the default webview engine is still not the new Chromium but old Edge (WebView2 has to be installed separately), Safari has a fair amount of issues and gtk-webkit can be very quirky as well. This is not so significant if your app…

> Webviews are also a moving target so you need a big testing matrix. Even worse, an OS update after you ship your app can spontaneously break it on end user's machines without you knowing or being able to do anything about it. At least with the web, when new browser versions come out, you can fix your site since users essentially "install" it every time they refresh the page. But an installed app that runs on top of…

[deleted]

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#60

Post by vulcan01 »

swagonomixxx wrote: post #39

This kind of makes me think... is there room for a much more stripped down version of Chromium that is suitable for lower memory footprint? Or is this impossible? It looks like Tauri uses system webviews, which use a lot less memory, but the burden is then on the developer to make sure that they build essentially 3 (maybe more) UI's on platforms that might change under their feet. That's why the Electron approach is…

> the burden is then on the developer to make sure that they build essentially 3 (maybe more) UI's on platforms that might change under their feet

Is this really different from the current state of web development? Front-end developers have to test against Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, at a minimum. For apps that are basically installable websites (like Slack, which has a perfectly functional webapp) this doesn't seem like that far of a stretch.

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